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During the 1976 presidential campaign, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter could not avoid the "unfinished business of the [Vietnam] war, " specifically the fate of the United States' war resisters, the million or so draft evaders and military deserters. To heal the domestic wounds of the Vietnam War, Carter promised to enact a "blanket pardon" for draft evaders during the first week of his presidency and thereafter to offer conditional, case-by-case pardons for military deserters. This article analyzes the domestic legacy of the Vietnam War in the 1976 election, most notably how, after considering media coverage, alternative news sources, and polling data, Carter and his campaign staff addressed the controversial campaign issue in an effort to "get the Vietnam war over with." Although magazines and television broadcasts provided important campaign information in 1976, newspapers remained a prominent news source. Thus, this article explores the negotiation over the meaning of the war resister issue among the Carter campaign, the press, and the public, and the structure of feeling that emerged in the analysis of archival documents at the Carter Library and in a census of a sample of news articles, feature stories, house editorials, columns, and letters to the editor in the top six circulating U.S. dailies.
"For some, the most moving moment of the Democratic convention occurred when two young men of the Vietnam era embraced each other on the stage-one who fought and one who ran way," Mary McGrory, a Pulitzer Prizewinning, Washington-based political journalist, observed in her August 2, 1976, syndicated column for the Boston Globe.1 McGrory, a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War, wrote of the "tableau" created by the appearance of war resister Fritz Efaw bending to embrace paralyzed veteran Ron Kovic on the main stage of the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York. Kovic seconded Efaw's nomination for vice president. Although the nomination had been largely symbolic (Efaw, age twenty-nine, could not occupy the position), it represented a segment of the party's fight for amnesty and desire to "heal the wounds of Vietnam."2
Despite gavel-to-gavel national network television coverage of the Democratic convention in mid-July, some Americans would not have a chance to see the symbolic act. ABC, which offered limited coverage of the proceedings, refused to acknowledge...